Tips for Snagging Hard-to-Get Reservations for California State Parks

I’ve told you before about Wright’s Beach, how much I love it, and how hard it is to get a reservation for the “premium” beachfront sites. Well, I managed to snag one this year for a week, and it took me enough tries (like, almost every morning for 3 weeks) that I think I can share some tips for those who are interested in those highly coveted and hotly contested Cal State Park camping spots.

The actual procedure you can find multiple places online:

1. Log into your account at reservecalifornia.com 6 months before the date you want to start camping at like 7:55 am PST
2. Select the state park you want (ignoring it when it says there are no sites available and clicking through to the campground you want) and select “furthest possible date.” You’ll also need to fill in some info about what kind of site you want (tent, RV, etc.).
3. It’ll show you the options at the campground that meet your criteria. However, all the ones for the starting date you want will show as “unavailable.” That’s because it’s not 8 am yet.
4. Now, watch the timer in the upper right of the page. The hot second it turns over to 8 am, click “Refresh” and then click on the site you want, which will now show as available.
5. At this point, you may get a “sorry, this site has already been booked” pop-up window; that’s game over–try again tomorrow and thank you for playing.
6. If you do manage to get passed through to the site reservation window, don’t rest on your laurels: click “Reserve” down to the right as fast as you can; you’re still being timed against other customers at this point. If you make it through to the payment page, that’s when you’ve made it. Now, you’ve got 14 minutes, or however long it says, to complete the reservation before the site gets released. Congratulations! Pop a bottle of champagne even though it’s 8 am and call all your friends and family to brag.

This procedure as detailed above and on so many other websites will probably never work for you, unless you’re my friend Cassandra, who is a magical fairy when it comes to getting Cal State Parks reservations. We can’t all be Cassandra, so here are some tips for working the system that worked for me. The upshot is: you have to be sneaky because the key to getting these reservations is being FAST and there’s no way you’re faster than nine 27-year-olds from San Francisco who are all trying for the same site you are and have honed their clicking skills coding for Elon Musk. Not to mention the bots they have written to get the reservation for them…. Cal Parks says they have put measures in to weed out these bots. I say 🤔. But at any rate, here we go:

• Reserve the default 1 night. You do not want to be fiddling with dates while Rome burns. You can go back in and extend your completed reservation to however many nights you want (up to the limit for each campsite) anytime before 8 am the next morning, when you’ll lose those nights to someone else.
• Be as flexible as you can with your camping format. There are some premium sites that are coded as “tent only” at beaches like Wright’s Beach, and throwing your tent and cooler in a beach wagon and wheeling it 50 yards from the parking lot is a small price to pay for views like the one above out your tent door.
• Book using your cell phone. It is 1000x faster to click “Refresh” and then the site you want using two thumbs strategically posed over those two places on the screen than it is to mouse between those buttons. This is honestly the trick that did it for me in the end. Of course, make sure you’ve got good 5G coverage or are on fast wi-fi, or the tech bros will have you dead to rights once again.
• Go for a site in the middle of the range of sites that meet your criteria. This is pure psy-ops: the bathtub effect predicts that people, if they don’t have a specific preference, are going to gravitate toward the first or last option in a range they’re presented (i.e., the options that “stick out”). You can slightly cut down the competition by going for a less-noticed option in the middle.

That’s it: go forth and conquer!